Monday, November 14, 2016

International cooperation, ethics and climate change

In pursuing meaningful sustainable development, and investing in
conservation and redressing the environmental damage caused by decades
of neglect, we need to better explore and understand the role of
international cooperation and why human values and ethics are central to
this debate.

International cooperation. A
key ingredient for generating a sustainable development path will have
to be a significant strengthening of the current mechanisms of
international cooperation, which have turned out to be insufficient to
meet the global challenges that we face. The process of globalization is
unfolding in the absence of equivalent international institutions to
support it and harness its potential for good.

There is no global environmental authority, for instance. Policy on the
climate change front is being done via ad-hoc approaches involving
elements of international cooperation, voluntary compliance, and large
doses of hope. In the absence of a body having jurisdiction over the
global environment with corresponding legal enforcement authority, the
international community has, de facto, abdicated management of the
world’s environment to chance and the actions of well-meaning states.
Even the 2015 Paris Agreement, bringing together 175 countries pledging
reductions in emissions, if implemented in full, will not prevent a
warming in excess of 2°C, the threshold recognized by climate scientists
as necessary to avoid “potentially devastating consequences” (Stern
2016).

Whether we focus our attention on climate change or other global
challenges, the fact is that major planetary problems are being
neglected because we do not have the mechanisms and institutions strong
enough to deal with them.

Effective, credible mechanisms of international cooperation, that are
perceived to be legitimate, and capable of acting on behalf of the
interests of humanity—rather than those of a particular set of
countries—are essential if the world is to meet the challenge of
striking the correct balance between concern for the environment and the
policies that must underpin such concern, on the one hand, and the need
to ensure that the global economy develops in a way that provides
opportunities for all, particularly the poor and the disadvantaged, on
the other.

It is an open question whether the existing system of sovereign nation
states is capable of achieving this level of cooperation, or if such a
system will require a more fundamental restructuring involving greater
levels of national accountability to ensure outcomes that will better
serve present and future generations.

Ethics and human values.
Finally, no strategy aimed at fostering the emergence of a sustainable
development path would be complete without a fundamental rethinking of
the human values that have driven much of the development process during
the past century. A considerable body of academic research in recent
years has examined the issue of the correlation between growing income
and human happiness. The question itself might have appeared slightly
quaint a couple of decades ago, when economists in academia and
policymakers in government and international financial organizations
more or less accepted as an article of faith that higher growth and
income would always be desirable and would increase human welfare, and
along with it, happiness.

Several insights, however, have contributed to a gradual change of
perspective. First, the realization that, however beneficial might have
been the several decades of robust post-war economic growth in improving
living standards, the global economy was beginning to run up against
environmental constraints which could actually be measured.

Second, psychologists, newly empowered with analytical tools developed
in other sciences, were able to show that human happiness was correlated
with income only up to a certain level. Money seemed to be crucially
important for happiness when basic material needs had not been met. But
once these had been satisfied, the sources of happiness shifted to other
concerns, reflecting deeper spiritual aspirations, including
friendship, relationships, a sense of purpose in life, security, among
others.

The above observations suggest the need to broaden the definition of
what constitutes “well-being” and investigate more closely the
relationship between increasing market activity and the welfare of the
people participating in the economic system. One starting point would be
to establish a clearer mental demarcation between the concepts of
“growth” and “development.”

The first is essentially a quantitative concept which captures the
expansion in the scale of the economic system, while the latter refers
to qualitative changes in this system and in its relationships with the
environment and other aspects of life in the community. Properly
understood, economics should concern itself less with how to add to the
physical dimension of the economic system and more with the long-term
welfare of the community whose interests the “system” is ultimately
intended to serve.